Lesson - starting hands

Even basic poker players soon learn that some hands are better than others. My friends 10 year old son knows pocket aces are brilliant and also gets the concept that some combinations of 2 cards are awful. There is a large range of hands in the middle though that would confuse him - is K-6 better than J-9 or is Q-10 unsuited better than 6-5 suited.

I did not start taking much notice of this until I started playing tournaments. I would win a few hands but would sometimes get criticized for being lucky or being a fish. The "experts" playing these tournaments range from young to old, fat to thin, men and women and they all seemed to be in on a secret agreement as to what hands should be played and what should not. And if you played the hands that you should not and you got lucky and won, you were due an insult and some name calling.

To learn this secret I looked on the internet and read some of the poker magazines. Arguably the most useful article for me was in Bluff magazine where they printed out a simple chart of good starting hands. From my research I began to understand that there is a lot of opinions of how good each starting hand is and when you should play it. I used the Bluff chart to help me in my tournament play and it paid huge dividends. Here's how I categorized hands at the very start of my training - note I have made several adjustments since but this was my starting point:

Great hands
AA, KK, A-Ks * note the little s means suited - anything without a little s means unsuited

Good hands
A-K, A-Qs, A-Js, K-Qs, K-Js, QQ, Q-Js, JJ

OK hands
A-10s, A-Q,A-J,K-Q,K-J,Q-J,J-10s,10-10

NoGood hands
all other pairs, all other combinations


Note as I progress through the training. I will explain more about the NoGood hands and why some of them might be good in certain circumstances but this list was my starting point. By only playing these starting hands and betting hard on the Great hands I got much better at tournaments. When I only played these hands in cash games I would often win the pots. The disadvantage of these hands is they do not come up very often which means you have to be very patient in your play.